Be Resurrection People

We have celebrated Easter and now we are to go forward, in faith, and in the knowledge that because Christ has died for us we have been made new. Easter reminds us that this challenge to renewal is before us every day. For each day we rise from the tomb of our sleep and enter into the resurrection dawn of a new day, a day in which we are challenged to live no longer in the finite darkness of sin, but in the eternal light of the resurrection. To put it another way, each day we are given the opportunity to be resurrection people.

ʺDo you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough? Clear out the old yeast, so that you may become a fresh batch of dough, inasmuch as you are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.ʺ (1 Corinthians 4:6-8)

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Because in baptism we have died in Christ, we are also risen in Christ. We are to put off the yeast of our old ways, the sinful habits of our old lives and put on the new ways of truth and goodness. Sin is the leaven that has corrupted the ʺbreadʺ of the world and the ʺbreadʺ of our individual lives. Christ has done away with the yeast. Now he asks us to live and love as ʺunleavened breadʺ in the world.

Let us, then, let go of the ʺyeastʺ of our old unresolved angers, our soul draining jealousies, and our insatiable, deadening habits of selfishness. Because of Good Friday and Easter, Christ has made us into ʺa fresh batch of dough, of unleavened bread.ʺ Let us celebrate in that knowledge with faith, hope, and love. We have been made new in ʺsincerity and truth.ʺ The Pascal Lamb of our salvation allowed himself to be sacrificed, to make all of this possible.

Christ’s death, the true Passover, is complete. Now it is time for the Christian community, and each one of us, renewed and marked by the sincerity and truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, to become a perpetual celebration of the festival of Unleavened Bread in this broken and suffering world.

This passage I am using today, from First Corinthians, was probably written by Paul around Passover time some years after the Resurrection. It is really like a little Easter homily, the earliest one in Christian literature. Let us now, in our Easter joy, begin to be the living book of that Christian literature with our lives in this broken world, for the sake of Christ. For the sake of Christ alone.